52.  But it is of great consequence that you should fix in your minds—­ and hold, against the baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and against the fallacies of controversial speculation on the other—­the certain and practical sense of this word “spirit;” the sense in which you all know that its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into your shape, and by which you love and hate when you have received that shape.  You need not fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the loving power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers into a metal, or evolved by them into a gas; but on the other hand, take care that you yourself, in trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its truth in a dream, or even in a word.  Beware always of contending for words:  you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several languages.  This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of the most doubtful.  In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions, to say “wit” when we say “ghost.”  In Greek, “pneuma,” the word we translate “ghost,” means either wind or breath, and the relative word “psyche” has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St. Paul’s words “pneumatic body” and “psychic body” involve a difference in his mind which no words will explain.  But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon and in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity the “spirit of man” truly means his passion and virtue, and is stately according to the height of his conception, and stable according to the measure of his endurance.

53.  Endurance, or patience, that is the central sign of spirit; a constancy against the cold and agony of death; and as, physically, it is by the burning power of the air that the heat of the flesh is sustained, so this Athena, spiritually, is the queen of all glowing virtue, the unconsuming fire and inner lamp of life.  And thus, as Hephaestus is lord of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, so Athena of the fire of the heart; and as Hercules wears for his chief armor the skin of the Nemean lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has for his highest name “the Pythian,” from his chief enemy, the Python slain; so Athena bears always on her breast the deadly face of her chief enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that turns living men to stone.

54.  And so long as you have the fire of the heart within you, and know the reality of it, you need to be under no alarm as to the possibility of its chemical or mechanical analysis.  The philosophers are very humorous in their ecstasy of hope about it; but the real interest of their discoveries in this direction is very small to humankind.  It is quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that the surface of the water in a ditch